Abby Simons

Abby Simons is the Star Tribune’s Public Safety Editor. Her team covers crime and courts across the metro. She joined the Star Tribune in 2008 and previously reported on crime, courts and politics.

Simons is a 2004 graduate of Northwest Missouri State University, where she studied journalism. Before joining the Star Tribune, she was a reporter for the Des Moines Register. Simons lives in Minneapolis, but will always root for the Kansas City Royals. She enjoys hanging out with her dog Bianca, riding her bike and trivia night at her local pub.

Defense attorneys were visibly frustrated by judge's ruling in the case of seven young Somali-American men charged with conspiring to support the terror group known as the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant.

Fearing their arrests were imminent, seven Somali-American men tried to get out of the country last spring to fight alongside terrorists in Syria before FBI agents could catch up to them, according to new evidence released Friday by federal prosecutors.

Tucked in the Minnesota Senate's Health and Human Services Omnibus bill is an appropriation to fund mental health services specifically for hundreds of Minnesota Hmong and Lao veterans born before 1965.

A coalition of House and Senate Republicans want to ban transgender students from participating in girls' sports and would require student athletes to use the bathrooms, locker rooms and changing rooms appropriate to their birth gender.